We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Demarra West a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Demarra thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
When I started my consulting practice fourteen years ago, I left a stable job with benefits to enter into a world of pure unknown. I had no road map for entrepreneurship, I knew no one who was an entrepreneur, and yet I felt that I could do more to help individuals and companies succeed in business after being on the management team of my company and seeing what consultants did. I started to do research about the field of consulting and discovered there were consulting pools you could apply to get into which could align you with work. Miraculously, although I had no consulting experience whatsoever, I was vetted into a few consulting pools throughout Michigan and NeighborWorks America, which is where the consultants I had worked with derived from. My first consulting opportunity was in Portland, Oregon, where I offered an hour workshop on community organizing. A year later, and a few consulting jobs here and there, that I took while using vacation time, I walked away from my full time job, started grad school, and launched the first CDF Freedom Schools program in my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I have done many things in between like becoming a therapist, yoga teacher, and Reiki master, but the consistent thread through all this has been my consulting practice, Change Agent Consulting, which helped me birth labors of love, such as Be Well Beautiful Woman, which is my latest body of work.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I’m the founding wellness practitioner and strategist of Be Well Beautiful Woman which is a global wellness & business community that provides accessible, healing, abundance, and joy support for women from all walks of life. Life and business coaching, retreats, & training is what we offer along with a blog the Be Well Beautiful Woman podcast. I’m also board chair for YWCA Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo County jury board member, and mom to an amazing seventeen year old daughter, and dog, Luna.
Wellness is something I take seriously not only because that’s the focal point of Be Well Beautiful Woman, but also because wellness has helped me heal from complex trauma I endured as an adolescent. In fact, according the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale, I have been exposed to eight of the ten of trauma incidents they measure in the instrument. And although have been a licensed professional counselor since 2010, it wasn’t until that I realized that I too, needed healing, which turned me on to a myriad of wellness modalities that I have utilized to not only heal myself and others, but also gain more peace, joy, and abundance in every area of my life. In terms of wellness training, I’m a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT), professional certified coach, and a Reiki master & teacher. I’m also trained in forest bathing, breathwork, meditation, and emotional freedom techniques (e.g. tapping).
I’m privileged to help my clients on a holistic level with launching and scaling a business, birthing a passion project, increasing their financial wealth, decreasing their anxiety and depression, improving their work/life balance, overcoming imposter syndrome, and an increase in their joy and peace.
What sets my apart from others is how I embody wellness in everything I do. I practice, practice, practice, and then practice some more. Understanding that harnessing optimal well-being is a life-long process is something that I discuss frequently in my work. The pursuit of wellness has been for me first. As I have benefited from wellness practices, I have been able to help other people benefit. Not only is this work deeply personal to me, I believe that the authentic way I show up in wellness spaces is also deeply humanizing. I understand there is no arrival, and that as my clients are in pursuit of more for their lives, that I too, am also pursuing more for mine. And because wellness is a journey with no real arrival in mind, no matter how much we heal, awaken, expand, there is always more. My willingness to lead with authenticity, remove the line as much possible of student and teacher, the use of humor, and a deep love for the people I’m privileged to serve with illuminates in everything I do. This is most certainly what sets me apart.
Accessibility has been the core of my work since I became an entrepreneur. I always felt that capacity building in any form shouldn’t just be for those people and companies that can afford it. So for fourteen years I have used my market rate clients as fuel to provide “pay what you can” and pro bono services. I’m also fortunate to partner with amazing not for profit like The Synergy Center, and foundations, such as, the Stryker Johnston Foundation, to ensure that money is no a barrier to helping women access essential wellness and business services. Accessibility is also about representation, who the messenger is what kinds of topics you’re discussing that are relevant to my lived experience. History shows that all the wellness practices we utilize today came from people of color across the globe, yet we are still sorely lacking when it comes to representation, not because we’re not offering these services, but because we may not be receiving the credit, or seen as the “experts” in this space. That is something I take seriously at Be Well Beautiful Woman. Although we are a wellness global community that is inclusive of women from all walks of life, having an intersectional, indigenous lens is paramount to helping women who have historically been left behind the wellness landscape, see themselves as truly worthy in this space.
I feel really fortunate that I have had many successes in my work. Women report things like this is the happiest they’ve ever been, the most money they’ve ever made, the most authentic they’ve ever felt. This is everything. How do you put a price tag on this?
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As a multi-racial Black woman I have countless stories of resilience. Just look to what’s trending these days and Black women are saying they’re tired of even being called resilient because they shouldn’t have to be so resilient due to systems of oppression. That said, a big one for me that I do feel led to share is before there was Be Well Beautiful Woman, I launched Black Women About Business which was a wellness and business community for Black women. After being in a business incubation program with very little diversity, I felt compelled to build something that was more relevant for fellow Black women. After countless hours of research, spending months laboring to ensure a successful launch, tons of networking across the country, building numerous partnerships, hiring two consulting groups (one for my retreat, one for business strategy), and my first ever executive assistant (and first staff) to help with the launch and other things in my consulting work, the day of the launch and after spending thousands of dollars (upwards of $50,000 to be exact) I had sold nothing, absolutely nothing. I was crushed. I drew within, boggled by what had just happened. I continuing trucking along, but knew I needed to pivot which resulted in a three city wellness & business tour in Michigan that heped me conjure up a few sponsors. And slowly but surely things became clear to me which brought me to two central epiphanies, one, wellness more than anything was the space I wanted to be in, and two, although Black women were central to my work, as I pondered about the women who touched my life, and my own racialized identity, I wanted to be more an inclusive community. From there Be Well Beautiful Woman was born. My first major offering, a summit at the beginning of COVID 19 isolation, was a summit called Covid Can’t Hold Us Down which ended up affirming my decision. From that free offering alone, more than 200 women registered, and by the end I took on three new coaching clients. It was the first time in the 1.5 years since I had my first launch when I started making money from this work. Up until that point, my consulting work had mainly funded my efforts, along with a few sponsors I had received from my wellness tour. Now two years in, I know for sure this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Something I have to keep unlearning is having a lack mindset. Growing up in poverty alone is a trauma factor. So even after I started making money, and could afford a more lavish lifestyle. I was crippled by fear. I knew how to earn money, had learned to keep it close, and I didn’t want people to know I had it. Giving the perception I didn’t have it, I felt, made me more relatable to the people. I didn’t want to seem out of touch or boujee, so I lived well below my means for a very long time. I also felt guilty I had money, and so may people I had grown up, knew, didn’t have it, which caused me to have survivors remorse. Yes, I knew I had worked for what I had, quite hard I might add, but yet I still felt guilty for my reality in comparison to someone else’s. Then I read E Squared by Pam Grout and it changed my life. The thought that I had the power to co-create my life with Source/Universe/God was pure power for me. Those nine experiments set me on a trajectory to absorb everything I could about having an abundant mindset. Since then I have read countless books on abundance, written tons of blogs about it, and present on it often in business, wellness, and leadership spaces. As I have studied what abundance is, and that it is connected to our birthright, I have since resisted anything in my pathway that represents lack. If I have the money I spend it, if I want to do something nice for someone I do it. I know that money is always coming my way, and all I have to do is trust that, take aligned action, stay curious about the ways abundance filters to me, and share my light with others. This is a daily practice. I work hard to pay attention how my thoughts, words, and actions are aligned with abundance or not, and then keep adjusting accordingly so I can open myself up to more and more and help others do the same. and of course abundance is way than money, it’s the extent to which we believe that we are worthy of more, and that we have the ability to produce it, with the support of Source.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bewellbeautifulwoman.com
- Instagram: @bwellbeautiful
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/be-well-beautiful-woman/?viewAsMember=true
Image Credits
Tulum shots (e.g. swing, follow your dreams, looking up with bold lip, and with arms up) Elegance Photography YWCA shot with orange background, Atrella Cohn Photography